


No, You Don't

by JiraiyaWhitney



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-29
Updated: 2012-04-29
Packaged: 2017-11-04 13:29:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/394413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JiraiyaWhitney/pseuds/JiraiyaWhitney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>inspired by this picture: http://janecrocker.tumblr.com/post/15017152330/no-you-dont</p>
            </blockquote>





	No, You Don't

                His teeth had never really been a problem before now. Junior year, everyone’s supposed to be growing up. Everyone’s out of that awkward, lanky phase of too-sharp elbows, too-abrupt hormone changes, braces and awkward pimples. They’re getting jobs now, they have lives outside of school, they have lives outside of home and outside of friends. They are growing up, becoming part of the world, but nothing ever really changes.

                Except for the worse.

                It probably started when he asked his dad if he could get braces (back when he was eleven). His father sighed, sat him down and explained, very carefully, that they didn’t have the money right then and that he would try his darnedest to get through and pay for them. He doesn’t blame his father. He could never blame him. He has a horrible job as a caterer that pays almost nothing, he’s a single father and he has to put up with John’s excessive internet use. He could never ask for more.

                But still, no one understands. He has friends, sure, but they didn’t go through the same trials as he did. They don’t understand what’s funny about Nic Cage or why he has to linger and long for someone to just _come over to him, sit at his table, say “hi”._

                No one ever sits at his table that likes him. Usually, someone sits beside him, punches him, bruises him, demands the homework that he was up until three in the morning carefully cultivating a specific grade for. Sometimes, people sit that don’t want to commission homework from him. Sometimes, they sit there, smile at him and say “How goes the dam building, beaver boy?”

                “Where did you get your hair done?” Some girls say. “Remind me not to go there.”

                “Bugs Bunny called—he wants his teeth back.”

                “Why don’t you just go home and try on one of your father’s dresses? It would look better than _those_ rags.”

                “How many dicks have you bitten this week?”

                “Why don’t you freeze your teeth and give your tongue a sleigh ride?”

                He manages to finish his lunch, but he’s not hungry. He wonders how different it would be if he had friends. He wonders if it would be better if he didn’t even have teeth. He wonders if he should shave his head—stop the jokes at his hair. He wonders if he should just hide out, drop out of school, take online courses, but he works at a movie theatre. He would still have to see everyone.

                So he stays silent and wonders what it would be like if he just… stopped existing. Eventually, they leave.

                School ends. Work ends. He comes home, eats dinner, thanks his dad for cooking and goes up to his room. His dad asks that he hand off a hello to his friends. He says he will, but he knows he won’t.

                He’s on for all of three seconds before he gets the notif inviting him to the _Caw Caw_ Memo-board.

 

GG: hey! :D how was school??

 

                He starts with “Ok”, but that doesn’t sound like him. “Fine I guess” sounds like he’s hiding something. “Everything went better than expected” sounds like some sort of bullshit “I don’t want to talk about this let’s talk about something else” excuse. He doesn’t know what to say. So, he decides to lie. He finds that he lies a lot to these people.

 

GT: lots of fun!  
TT: Uneventful.  
TG: boring as hell  
GG: aww! i wish i could go to public school with the other kids!

 

_No you don’t._

It takes him several minutes to be able to delete that text and be able to live with himself. He feels like he’s just as bad as the people who do it to him. He doesn’t know why.

÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷

                She knows she is different. She prides herself on it. Days on end, she can push herself on the adrenaline rush of another job well done. She sits and knits just to keep her mind at ease. Just to keep her thoughts off of those bastards.

                As a trust fund baby, she doesn’t need a job. In fact, she’s not allowed to have any other job but her writing career (which is going swimmingly for someone her age). She spends days on end, talking to Jade, praying that the others have a random day off just to speak with them. Often times, she or Jade fall asleep before Dave is able to get on and long before John gets off of work.

                There are days where even knitting and writing don’t get her mind off of it, though. She can’t escape—doesn’t _want_ to escape. She knows that, as a child, she was eccentric, believed in all the bad and none of the good, and read some of the creepiest shit one could ever find…. But that doesn’t mean she can’t _regret_ it.

                Most days, it’s during the transition period between sixth and seventh hour, where she’s going from Calc 1-2 to her fashion-design class. She usually stalls long enough to shove her textbooks in her locker before going in. Sometimes, another girl shoves her against the locker, not often, but sometimes.

                “Look, the Lolita put pants on today.”

                “Lalonde, the Devil called, he wants his minion to go home.”

                “What’s that Carly? No, I can’t hear you over the sound of my ears bleeding from Lalonde’s Satan-garble!”

                “How do you get an emo out of a tree? Don’t be an idiot Sandra, you know the answer is to cut the rope.”

                “How much do you hate yourself Lalonde? What are you talking about, emos and goths hate themselves and everything around them, _right_?”

                “Better watch out or the _big, bad goth_ will put a curse on you!”

                She wishes the world could just swallow her whole and never release her, forcing her to suffocate on her own unshed tears. She feels like she already has.

                So, regardless of the time or the date or even when she originally fell asleep, she switches her mood on and waits for the invite from Dave to join the group (it’s always from Dave, somehow, and the only reason she knows this is because he is always the one to change her status to an OP). Even late at night, long after her mother has drunken herself to oblivion and passed out half way up the staircase.

                There are some nights where she tip-toes down as she waits, goes to the never-locked liquor cabinet and tastes the vodka or makes a martini or even takes a sip of wine. It always burns her throat and she can never get pass two or three drinks, but there are some nights that she forces herself to go further with it, feels the way her mind goes fuzzy and each singular cell in her liver as it slowly, slowly dies.

                Sometimes, she thinks, her mother is right for drinking.

                It’s times like these that she thanks her mother for being the careless alcoholic she is.

                She accepts the invite from Dave and musters up a half-hearted thanks as she is granted OP-ship.

 

GG: hey! :D how was school??  
GT: lots of fun!

 

                John could never understand. He always has fun; he’s always upbeat. He probably has a thousand friends at school and never has to deal with the pain in his chest that she feels every time she is called emo or goth. But, these events aren’t unusual. There is nothing out of the ordinary in this.

 

TT: Uneventful.  
TG: boring as hell  
GG: aww! i wish i could go to public school with the other kids!

                It takes everything she has to not say “No, you don’t”, because the others would know if she did. That’s something she can’t do.

÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷

                Dave has had this problem since kindergarten. It’s something that he expects at this point. Spray-on tan (he pays an arm and a leg to make it look untanned, though, and Bro is cool enough to never mention it) and blond-dyed hair (he can’t stand the white of cotton fuzz staring back at him, but at least he can hide his happy trail and his crotch) can only hide so much. His eyes aren’t easy to hide, though. They can’t be hidden by contacts (he can’t stand touching his eye, it’s impossible, and he paid Bro back the thirty bucks he spent on the contacts after he admitted it), but they can be hidden by sunglasses.

                Even _he_ makes mistakes though. Small mistakes, like eight and eight accidently equaling sixty-eight when he knows it’s sixty four, and large mistakes, like showing the woman he had been dating for two years now his real eye color.

                It all went downhill from there since, you know, she was the captain of the cheerleading team and he was the dweeb that everyone has been trying to get information on since they got together. Red eyes? What _freak_ would be stupid enough to date the most beautiful woman in the entire school when he isn’t attractive himself?

                Even though it was three weeks ago that they broke up, the hell that he’s gotten has more than quadrupled. Now, they poke fun at his eye color, they slice the back of his hand open or give him a bloody nose just to see how well it compares to his eyes. He’s removed the spray-on tan in this time, making his colorless skin hang out in the open (he’s a fucking Junior, _it’s time to stop hiding_ , he tells himself) and he has bleached his hair back to its natural color.

                He, of course, keeps his glasses on.

                “Alabaster skin.”

                “Snowflake.”

                “Old lady’s dress.”

                “He belongs on top of Mount Everest.”

                “Fucking red eyes.”

                “Period-eyes.”

                But, worse of all, is when his ex has the fucking courage to say “you aren’t fooling anyone with your lame shades, you dweeb.”

                It’s as if they only dated so that she could find out his secret.

                He’s knows that’s the truth. He just can’t admit it to himself.

 

                He doesn’t even make it to his bed or his desk. He collapses to his knees, flops to sit against the wall and drags the cord of his laptop down until it flops in his lap. He logs in. Instantly, Jade starts a conversation with him. He goes about setting up the memo in case the other two come, though it’s been a few months since he talked to either. (He wonders how long it would take for them to notice his disappearance, but decides he can’t do it to them.)

 

GG: hey! :D how was school??  
GT: lots of fun!  
TT: Uneventful

 

                He doesn’t want to lie to them and say that he had a good day. No, he fucking didn’t. He can’t even sit with his friends anymore. Today, he spent all lunch in the bathroom, digging his nails into his skin until he bled just so that he wouldn’t cry. But, other than that ever-present pain deep in his very soul…. nothing really happened.

                Besides, telling them would only worry them. He doesn’t want to do that.

 

TG: boring as hell  
GG: aww! i wish i could go to public school with the other kids!

 

                _No you don’t._

He types out an entire paragraph of why she doesn’t want to, complete with punctuation, until the tears he has refused to let fall soak the collar of his shirt and he’s hiccupping with the urge not to let Bro hear him. Then,

                He deletes it all and says that she’s fine just where she is. The other two are fast to agree. Because, after all…

                She

                Is

                The

                Lucky

                One


End file.
